


Of Restraints and Amagons

by Jaelijn



Series: Whumptober [1]
Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Angst, Episode Tag, Episode Tag: s01e11 Bounty, Episode: s01e11 Bounty, Gen, Missing Scene, Restraints, Whump, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:00:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26773294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaelijn/pseuds/Jaelijn
Summary: Avon knew something had gone wrong before he was fully awake.A missing scene for 1x11 Bounty.Written for Whumptober 2020 and the prompt #1: "Let's Hang Out Sometime: Waking Up Restrained | Shackled | Hanging".
Relationships: Kerr Avon & The Liberator Crew, The Liberator Crew - Relationship
Series: Whumptober [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1951792
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	Of Restraints and Amagons

**Author's Note:**

> Whumptober is my kind of challenge, so I'll be writing a few fics for it and here is the first one. I probably won't have everything done in order or even in October or at all, but look forward to more whump-y fics coming soon. 
> 
> For now, enjoy this little missing scene!

Avon knew something had gone wrong before he was fully awake.

For a moment, he couldn’t remember where he’d been, whether he’d gone to sleep – then the cloying aftertaste of the knockout gas intruded upon him. Avon coughed helplessly, his eyes springing open.

He was staring at a patch of floor.

“Easy, Avon,” rumbled the voice of Olag Gan somewhere behind him and off to the side.

Avon couldn’t see him, lying almost prone on the ground. He twisted and found his arms trapped behind him. When he gave an investigative tug, the hard edge of sturdy restraint cuffs dug into his wrists.

He sagged back, waiting for the coughing fit to fully subside. The feeling of being unable to breathe only really eased as Avon managed to rock onto his side. He didn’t even want to think about trying to sit up, for the moment.

“What happened?” he asked, hating his inability to recall… a distress call – a trap! He’d been in the teleport unit…

“They call themselves Amagons,” Gan said. “Heard of them?”

“No.”

With his hands bound into uselessness, coming to a sitting position was an awkward struggle. It very nearly set the cough off again, vague nausea and groggy exhaustion fighting for attention. The aftereffects of the gas were willing him to go back to sleep, and Avon fought all the harder to focus. 

“Pirates and smugglers, apparently,” Gan explained, “and headhunters.”

“I suppose it would have been too much to hope for a simple misunderstanding.”

Avon scanned the room. They were in one of the unused rooms near the teleport unit if he wasn’t mistaken. _Liberator_ had many empty spaces, apparently having been designed for a much larger crew compliment, and many of them looked functionally the same, difficult to tell apart if you hadn’t walked there yourself. The doors all locked from the outside, of course.

He turned his attention to his sole companion. Gan was bound, too, his shoulders pulled sharply back. A bright blue collar with a steadily gleaming control light lay snuggly against his throat.

Avon swallowed and felt a similar weight bob against his own throat. _Wonderful._

“The others?”

“Jenna woke before you. She seems to know the Amagon leader – she’s gone with them.”

“I see,” Avon commented bitterly. So much for loyalty among Blake’s rabble, not that he had ever trusted any of them. Still, he wouldn’t have expected it of Jenna, who’d refused to abandon Blake on Cygnus Alpha even though she’d barely known the man then...

“I haven’t seen Vila. Cally and Blake aren’t due back yet, I think.”

“Vila was on watch.” Avon shifted his hands, trying to twist his fingers enough to explore the cuffs that held his wrists trapped a small distance apart. “They’ve probably caught him by now.”

Gan made a vaguely agreeing sound.

Avon couldn’t reach, the pads of his fingers slipping useless off the edge of the cuffs. Giving up on dexterity while his head was still spinning dizzily, Avon made an attempt at brute force and pulled at the restrains sharply. He didn’t achieve a shred of give. Ropes, he might have been able to get out of; these were professional restraints. “Can _you_ break these?” he asked Gan.

“No. Sorry. They’re damnably tight.”

Tight and strong and unmoving. With his hands held apart, Avon could only really run his fingers over a small portion of them, not finding any opening mechanism. It was probably a matter of design that he couldn’t, another layer of security. Perhaps Vila might have a chance… _if_ the thief were with them.

Avon rolled his shoulders gingerly, trying to ease the stiffness of his back. The taste of the gas still lingered bitterly on his tongue. He was also desperately thirsty – probably another side effect. “Are these Amagons in the market for slaves,” he asked, “or are they selling us to the Federation?”

“Selling us, I think,” Gan said, sounding apologetic. “I’m sorry, Avon; they used me for the trap.”

Avon remembered well enough now, remembered Gan suicidally teleporting onto the alien ship, and remembered Jenna telling him to teleport him back, not before time. She hadn’t been a traitor, then, but clearly it hadn’t been _Gan_ who had come on board. What had happened then was a blank – he couldn’t even recall having had a decent look at the intruder. He had no idea what they were up against.

Amagons. They might be human, or they might not be. Avon didn’t much feel like finding out, but the ignorance might be worse.

“I take it that last transmission wasn’t you?”

Gan shook his head. “They used a voice synthesiser.”

“Of course.”

A commotion outside the door drew their attention, and for a moment Avon considered trying to rush the first person through the door – but he would have found it difficult just to get to his feet quickly enough.

The door swung inward, followed immediately by the inert form of Vila Restal, flung unceremoniously towards them and very nearly into Avon’s lap before he had any chance of moving out of the way – and less chance, of course, of breaking the thief’s fall.

Avon's first real look at one of the Amagons was a nastily grinning, moustached, turban wearing man. The Amagon appeared human and was brandishing some sort of control box. “Try anything,” the Amagon sneered, “and boom!”

And with that, the door was flung back into lock.

Avon pushed Vila away from him with his knee. The thief rolled onto his side, stopped by his hands which had been tied in the same way as theirs. Vila was still breathing, but completely unconscious.

“Any idea what he was talking about?”

“The remote controls these collars,” Gan answered. “Apparently they can be triggered to explode.”

“Oh, even better,” Avon muttered, studying the unconscious Vila, who might well be his only chance at freedom. “How long was I out?”

“I don’t know. They brought me in here after you and Jenna.”

Avon frowned, but didn’t comment. There was nothing to do but to wait for Vila to regain consciousness. It wasn’t even worth voicing the dig at the thief that automatically sprang to mind. Without Vila’s skill at locks, they were as good as lost, even if they could somehow break out of the room with their hands tied behind them.

Avon turned away. _Think of something else_. But his mind was still sluggish, still bogged down by the aftereffects of the gas. The increasing discomfort of having his hands bound behind him was difficult to blend out in a room this empty. _If_ he were free, he could get the door open. _If_ he were free, he could link up to Zen. _If_ he were free, he could take the ship back. But he wasn’t free.

Vila came to rather more quickly than Avon had expected. The first sign of it was Vila’s sudden dissolving into a spluttering coughing fit, a grimace distorting his face. Next came the expected pained whine, more heavily accented in half-awareness: “Oh, me head…”

“You’re all right, Vila,” Gan said, offering Vila his own brand of reassurance before Avon could snap at him in frustration.

“Gan!” Vila’s eyes opened, his roaming gaze fastening on Avon, who had settled down on his backside as comfortably as he could, not bothering to move further away. Where was there to go, after all? “Avon! That wasn’t Gan, that transmission…”

Avon curled his lips in distaste. “We know,” he commented dryly, shifting in discomfort despite himself.

“You do?” Vila subsided into confused silence for a moment, wriggling his shoulders. “Cuffs?” he asked weakly.

“Can you get out of them?”

Vila shuffled into sitting cross-legged. The drugged confusion seemed to be fading – at least Vila was biting at this lower lip in concentration. Avon could see his shoulders shift methodically as he tested the bonds. “I’ve got me probe. Maybe,” Vila said finally, nodding towards him, “lemme have a look at yours.”

Avon turned his back to him, shifting his hands to show off the restraints. It gave him a chance to hunch forward briefly, trying to ease his back without the others seeing his grimace of pain. Being bound like this was uncomfortable even for a short term; the longer his hands were trapped, the more it strained at his shoulders and upper back.

“Oof,” Vila said. “Yeah. ‘s not going to be easy, with my own hands bound. Who are these people?”

“Amagons,” Gan said again, possessing seemingly infinite patience for repetition.

“Amagons? Oh no.” Vila sounded as if that meant something to him, and Avon very nearly twisted around to snarl at him but, “No, Avon, stay like that! I’ve almost…” Vila rustled behind him, then sighed in self-satisfied relief. “Ah, that’s much better.”

There was a dull clank on the decking. Vila had opened his own cuffs.

Avon had already begun to rethink the wisdom of hiding a pick in his shoe, where he couldn’t reach it bound as he was, where he couldn’t use it to even try and free himself. Now, the foolishness of that hiding place was driven home again, along with his lack of experience in the criminal world. The feeling of utter helplessness was suddenly suffocating. “Vila, stop dawdling!” he snapped and twisted around to see.

“I’m not!” came the immediate protest. Vila sat rubbing his wrists, a slender lockpick clasped between his fingers. “But I’d better do Gan first. Damn things were tight on _me_ , and your fingers looked fine. Amagons won’t care if Gan gets gangrene. Smugglers, the lot of them, but the nasty kind. Armed robbery, murder, it’s nothing to them.”

Avon thought about asking Vila how he knew that, what else he _knew_ – but he was reluctant to add ignorance to helplessness, especially in front of Vila, so he just let it go. “Just get on with it.”

Avon couldn’t see what Vila was doing behind Gan’s back anyway, so he turned his gaze away and tried to distract himself. He did _not_ want to think of the long transport car ride, bound as he was now, that had transferred him from where he’d been caught to the prison where he’d been interrogated, charged, and eventually sentenced. It had been one of the lowest points in his life, even as he had thought he could not possibly sink any lower, and Avon didn’t care for the reminder. And apparently it still had not been enough to prepare him for situations like this. And he had thought himself so clever when he’d hidden the tool in his boot…

After a short while, Vila gave another soft cry of triumph and a second set of manacles clattered to the floor.

“There. Now, Avon. Might go faster if you lie down on your side, give me some room to work with.”

Avon glared at him. After the effort he had put into getting upright, he wasn’t keen on lying back down. But Vila’s hands were already pushing at his shoulders – Vila had been emboldened, no doubt, by his defencelessness and the chance to show off his lockpicking skills. Pushing aggravation down behind a shallow façade of graciousness, Avon let himself be lowered onto his shoulder. He swallowed the acidic comment on his tongue when Vila set to work immediately, without fanfare or further comment. 

A few moments later, the pressure on Avon’s wrists eased and he could slip the restraints to the floor. “Better get these out of sight,” he instructed, trying to get a hold of himself. He pushed to his feet to prowl closer to the door. His legs were nearly asleep, and his head span a little with dizziness on coming upright, though that faded quickly.

There was no sound from outside.

Avon might be able to open the door, now that he was no longer bound – but even that would do them little good, with the collars to keep them docile. There was bound to be a guard outside. How did the remotes work – would it trigger all of their collars? Would it affect only whoever was in the direct line of the microwave beam? Was he willing to risk being blown to bits – was he willing to risk one of the others being blown to bits as a decoy? His stomach turned a little at the thought.

“Blake and Cally should be back soon, right?” Vila asked, some nervousness creeping back into his voice.

“Yes.” Avon ran a finger over the collar absently. He didn’t have much hope that the two missing crew members would be able to take the ship back. They had no idea what had happened while they’d been done on the planet. They had no idea of Jenna’s betrayal. Without warning and with Jenna working for their captors, they didn’t stand much of a chance. And then, of course, was the unknown factor of their expected guest, _if_ the Amagons hadn’t alerted the Federation guards stationed down on the surface and _if_ they made it off the planet.

“You shouldn’t fiddle with that, you know,” Vila said, suddenly behind him. “Force it and it’ll go bang.”

Refusing to let on that he had been startled, Avon spun away from Vila sharply and paced to the other side of the room.

Gan had pushed their cuffs into a pile in a hidden corner. The hateful things lay in a cluster that resembled disassembled components but could quickly turn back into restraints, should their captors notice that they had freed themselves. Avon very nearly kicked at them in frustration.

He could take the ship single-handedly, if he got to the nearest computer unit – but an escape attempt was far too risky with the collar still around his neck. “Could you remove the collars?” he asked Vila.

“What, me?! Not a chance. And what if I mess it up? Are _you_ volunteering to find out?”

“There’s someone coming!” Gan barked suddenly, cutting into Vila’s tirade. “Down, Vila!”

They moved rapidly into a huddle, folding their arms demurely back – just in time for the door to open and Cally to be flung into the room.

Avon very nearly jumped to catch her, inwardly cursing himself for a fool for his pointless protective instincts even as he disciplined himself into stillness. Luckily, the Amagon guards did not seem to have noticed his rather too mobile jolt. Vila was shooting him odd glances, but what Vila thought mattered little.

A moment later they were alone again.

“Is she all right?” Gan asked.

Avon gently rolled the Auron onto her side. “Breathing fine. Vila, get her cuffs.”

“Fine, fine,” Vila grumbled. “I suppose it’s too much to hope they forgot to collar her?”

Avon brushed away some of Cally’s hair, revealing the same blue collar. “No such luck.”

“Oh, great.”

Avon’s feelings exactly, but he didn’t need Vila to know that. He resumed his pacing, trying to come up with a solution. Cally was back – which might mean that Blake was, too. But then why wasn’t he with her?

A low moan, echoing telepathically, brought him back around.

“Cally, take it easy, I’ve almost got this… There.” Vila brandished Cally’s set of cuffs and flung them into the corner with the others just as Cally was sitting up. Whatever they had used to knock _her_ out, it hadn’t lasted nearly as long as the gas used on them, or perhaps her different physiology had worked in her favour.

 _What happened?_ she asked groggily, her fingers running over the collar.

“We’ve been taken over by bounty hunters, what else?” Avon said. “Where is Blake?”

Cally glanced around the room in rapid assessment. Avon had thought her guerrilla instincts useful before; now he positively envied them. He wondered wryly whether she had been trained in any strategies of getting out of slave collars.

“Blake went to the flight deck,” Cally was saying, “to find out what had become of you all. They must have attacked me from behind. What are these?” She tapped the collar.

“They’ll take of your head if you do something they don’t like,” Vila explained with a crooked, bitter grin. “Lovely people, these Amagons.”

“Amagons?”

“Pirates.” Avon walked over to the door, listening. “If Blake was with you, we should be ready to keep up appearances. They may come back any moment.”

“Where is Jenna?” Cally asked.

“Later – I hear footsteps!”

Again, they pretended to be safely restrained – and again, it worked. Blake was thrust into their midst without a second glance towards the rest of the prisoners. Blake was completely out of it and drooling onto the decking. Vila didn’t need prompting to get going at his cuffs, while Gan filled Cally in about Jenna’s betrayal. Avon stayed where he was and watched Vila attack Blake’s cuffs.

Now, there was a thought – their combined skill set may not have be enough to get out of this, but _Blake_ might just be determined and stupid enough to have Vila have a go at his collar. Depending on the result, Avon would plan his next step – yes. He sighed, watching Vila work and thinking about the pick in his boot. Yes, perhaps there was a chance, after all.


End file.
